Meet Sapira, the New Mattress That Wants to Take Over Bedrooms Everywhere

In 2016, you can order pretty much anything from the comfort of your couch. From groceries to a ride to work, there's pretty much no market whose goods and services can't be delivered to your doorstep in a matter of days. That now includes mattresses: No more dimly-lit strip mall stores with up-selling associates. No more researching what the hell a pillow top is. No more pretending to nap for two minutes on a dingy tester bed and then shelling out four figures for a setup that might work.

But until this month, this small (but growing) corner of this new direct-to-consumer marketplace only offered memory foam, the big squishy blocks of material people have been turning to as an alternative to innerspring mattresses. Then Sapira, a company started by the founders of Leesa, came onto the scene with the goal of bridging the gap between traditional mattresses and these rolled-up bricks of foam. Their secret: a thousand pocket springs made from recycled steel sandwiched between two one-inch layers of stabilizing foam, and topped with even more padding: one-and-a-half inches of cooling foam and another one-and-a-half inches of memory foam. The entire thing is made from American materials and assembled in a factory in Mississippi, then compressed and rolled into a box smaller than most suburban coffee tables.

Hybrids have a spotty track record in the consumer goods world (the good: cars, cookie shots; the bad: dress shoe sneakers) but Sapira's ultimate goal of getting me a better night's sleep made me say "yes" to their offer to test one of their models. My first thought was, why is this thing so heavy?

The box, which is about the size of the containers that mattresses from Helix and Casper come in, got to my apartment while I was still at work. It was so weighty that my roommate half heartedly lugged it over the threshold and left it for me to deal with in our living room. Getting it from there to my bedroom—which, thanks to the nature of New York City real estate, was not a long trip—wasn't easy, but I eventually found the weight oddly comforting. Compressing a spring mattress into the shape of a Ho Ho was never going to reduce its weight. Plus, it falls right in line with that old adage about being able to tell something's value from how it feels in your hand. Or in this case, on your lower back.

Once I'd rolled it onto my bed, I cut away the plastic and watched it unfurl as the springs expanded to their full height. Imagine watching a roll of sushi disassemble itself and you've got a good idea of what this looks like. And it happened pretty quickly, too: this inanimate thing came to life for just a few seconds before settling into its final form.

So how does it feel? It's soft, thanks to all the various foams, but it's also incredibly supportive. Instead of sinking into it, you feel borne aloft by the hundreds of springs underneath your body at any given time. (That's been an incredibly important element of this mattress for me in particular; as an unrepentant side sleeper, I need a mattress with enough support to keep my spine aligned through the night, and the handful of occasions I've slept on memory foam have all left me with twinges in my back.) It's also very cool, thermally speaking. Because of its construction, air can flow through it, so the heat from your body isn't trapped the way it might be with other alternatives.

In short: The first night I slept so peacefully that I snored through all of my alarms the next morning. I was very late to work.

And while it's a little more expensive than other alternatives (my full size model goes for $1,275), think of the money as making an sound investment in something you spend a third of your life doing. But for the sake of your job, make sure you have a really good alarm clock.